On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 9:20 AM, Rustom Mody wrote:

For those who may be interested here is another curiosity:
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCarthy

wherein McCarthy attributes the idea of functional programming to Fortran and Backus -- I must say I find that striking -- how things have turned in 50 years!

That makes sense. See Backus's language “FP” and “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs” (http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf ).

All this is towards a lecture on programming paradigms that I am preparing.

Good luck! :)

Regards,

Sean